


Entropy, And Financial Fantasy

by karanguni



Series: Nasdack [7]
Category: FFVII, FFXII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Real World, Domesticity, M/M, Stockmarket AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-26
Updated: 2008-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 22:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rufus re-negotiates his territory. Balthier rearranges it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entropy, And Financial Fantasy

Rufus lives in a quiet world.

It's New York City, but he's known her long enough to find pockets of silence. Rufus doesn't talk when he doesn't need to talk - he saves the speeches for the boardrooms, not the bedroom. His penthouse is carefully engineered to keep people out, and himself within. Rufus is self-sufficient within those walls; a kitchenette, a phone, a computer, a bed, a few walls, windows. White and black and grey and glass and steel. He's not spare the way Tseng is spare; Tseng enjoys what he does. Rufus keeps his penthouse bare because it reminds him of the privilege of ownership.

Chicago's never going to be far away enough, for him. Rufus lives in a glass house, so that every time he enters and breathes and lives as an emancipated human being, he remembers exactly how free and alive he really is.

Tseng doesn't exactly approve. 'You're not like me, Rufus,' he says, amused and edgewise concerned.

'You've always been a good role model,' Rufus replies as they watch the city. Bare, bare, bare against the lights. Rufus never really noticed it before; only against Balthier's texture and tonality does he see how much he doesn't have.

Tseng puts a hand on his shoulder, which makes Rufus turn back. 'You complained,' Tseng reminds him, 'almost every other night while you were away. About everything that you couldn't have, and now you try and tell me that you don't want anything at all?'

'I've got enough,' Rufus says.

'You're well on your way to ruling whatever world you're building,' Tseng agrees. 'But you're looking at Balthier with more envy than jealousy some days.'

Rufus chuckles. 'Maybe I'm getting used to him. I'd have thought that you'd be glad.'

'I don't make comparisons,' Tseng says. 'I give the both of you whatever you need. Which is my way of telling you that you should take what you want.'

'I've got enough,' Rufus repeats, so damned quiet that Tseng has to move him, press up against him for half a moment. 'Tseng --'

Tseng cuts him off with a wave of a hand. 'I'm not Balthier. And for all that he's --'

'Gregarious, irritating, loud, excessive?' Rufus provides, arch.

'-- yes, for all of that, there are some qualities to his nature.' Tseng is temperate, unshakable, a wall that Rufus just crashes against again and again and again. It could drive Rufus crazy. He thinks Tseng knows that. Rufus doesn't say anything; he thinks of Balthier's easy smiles and easier mannerisms, the way he moves. 'Invite him over,' Tseng murmurs, moving away and reaching for his jacket. 'For something other than sex. If you're going to be acquaintances, you might as well get to know each other.'

'Are you sure that's a good idea?' Rufus asks as he walks Tseng to the door.

Tseng puts his hand on the doorjamb and smiles. 'I think it's a risk. But you like those, don't you?'

-

'I,' Rufus says, when he comes in and finds his penthouse -- redecorated. 'Am going to cut you.'

Balthier looks up. 'There're a couple of things about your penthouse,' he says, sitting in the midst of what looks like the dismembered remains of an Ikea catalogue. 'For one, you've got your own private garage, which is the most useful thing I've seen in this bloody city where everyone either walks or rots on the trains.' There're boxes in stacks next to the Bunansa. Rufus' living room, previously home to a generic glass table and one (1) flatscreen television, is now a tarp-covered playground of toolboxes and a --

'Couch,' Rufus says.

Balthier looks at it. 'Well done! I did wonder if you knew what the things were called, considering the notable dearth of said furnishing. Also known as a 'sofa', though I'd hesitate from calling this one a 'lounge'--'

'Balthier--'

'I puzzled over getting this one for such a long time. Do I buy the white, I asked myself, or do I buy the white? In the end I asked myself: what would Shinra do?'

Rufus puts down his keys on his (thankfully still extant) dining table, and arches an eyebrow at him. 'Did you redecorate my penthouse because you lack your own?'

'Hotels aren't always comfortable,' Balthier says, breezily. 'And all your chairs appear to have been stunted by poor nutrition sometime in their youth. You Asians are all too short.' He squints at Rufus' hair; he is abruptly conscious of the blond. 'Even half-Asians in denial.'

'You're avoiding the question,' Rufus points out charitably. He doesn't, in truth, know where Balthier is or has been staying. He realises he has no idea how long Balthier's going to be staying at all. Tseng doesn't entertain squatters.

'I'm very good at avoiding questions I don't want to answer,' Balthier agrees.

Rufus doesn't push. He doesn't know the other man well enough to want to – which is the outward reason. Inwardly, he thinks that if the man doesn't want Tseng enough to stay in Manhattan, he can damn well crawl back to London and subsist there for as long as he likes.

So Rufus, privileged in his own territory, smiles, and questions, 'Why did Tseng give you my keys?'

'I really think it's something in the air,' Balthier tells Rufus, patting the atrociously large (white) couch/sofa. 'I understand that being enigmatic can be very attractive, but you two make moves around each other as though it pains you to ever be direct. This,' he gestures at the room, 'wasn't my idea.'

'Somehow,' Rufus replies, dry, 'I'm finding that hard to believe.'

Balthier brushes off his pants as he unfurls, and saunters into the circle of Rufus' refuge at the dining table. He stands too close, and also brings what remains of the catalogue with him. Rufus can see little notes on the side. The handwriting's too familiar to be Balthier's. 'Can you blame a man if one day he walks into his office to find an Ikea catalogue on his desk?'

'No.' Rufus looks away from Tseng's handiwork and up at the Bunansa. 'But I can blame him for working off his impulses in inappropriate ways.'

'I'm a man of excess, Shinra. You have me smiling at executives and conquering small companies with very good lies. Sometimes, however rarely, I feel the urge to get my hands dirty with honest work.'

'He bought you a multi-million dollar laboratory for a reason, I'm guessing,' Rufus points out.

'A multi-million dollar laboratory that I have to hire people to use,' Balthier shoots back. 'If he wanted to keep me occupied, he should've bought me a few vintage cars.'

'You'd hate driving in Manhattan,' Rufus tells him. He's still at the dining table. It's a strange kind of battlefield. Balthier gives an elaborate shrug that culminates in him reaching over to slide his fingers along the breadth of Rufus' shoulders.

'Think about the opportunities, ' Balthier murmurs. 'With anonymously supplied toolkits and a conveniently tarped room, Shinra, you and I could build anything.'

Balthier taps the Ikea catalogue.

Rufus bursts out laughing for the first time in years. He shrugs out of his coat and rolls up his sleeves. He gives Balthier a long, long look; the man’s grinning at him. 'I'm good with schematics. I'll assume you know how to handle the powertools?'

'Powertools do have their uses,' Balthier says, 'but I do wonderful things with a screwdriver.'

-

Entropy isn't Tseng's favoured form of therapy – he'll leave off home-wrecking and table-sweeping habits in favour of tight, controlled anger – but he knows he guessed well when he thought it'd be Rufus'.

He knocks on Rufus' door at two in the afternoon, and walks in without blinking an eye (or offering a greeting) when Balthier wrenches it open, sweaty and smelling like laminated wood and sawdust.

'Good to see you too,' Balthier mutters to the empty corridor, closing the door behind Tseng. 'I used to entertain the thought that you'd be a little more charming when we weren't fucking around in foreign hotel rooms.'

'Your ability to fantasize has always been enviable,' Tseng throws back over his shoulder. He moves to Rufus' form-over-function dining room, where he sets two plastic bags down on the table. Rufus comes over, wiping the back of his wrist across his forehead. Tseng turns slightly and speaks over the snap of rubber bands and Styrofoam packaging. 'Lunch. I doubt either of you've eaten.' He looks over Rufus' shoulder at the warzone that once was the living room. 'Having fun, I see.'

'Your man is hopeless with knobs and joints,' Balthier pronounces, seating himself, disgruntled and sprawling, at the table. The chair is notably too short for him. 'The only thing he's ever put together in his life is jigsaw puzzles, and even that was through a chain of command.' Balthier eyes the food suspiciously, which is cheap and looks nothing like the stuff men of his breeding are used to seeing. 'What’s this?'

'Lunch,' Tseng repeats, patiently, and hands Balthier a plastic fork.

'There's only enough for two,' Balthier observes. 'Not staying?'

'I don't think I require this brand of male bonding.' Tseng beckons at Rufus, reaching for the man's badly bunched shirtsleeves. 'I had my fill of do-it-yourself home improvement when I was younger.' Tseng drags Rufus' sleeves down and refolds them in sharp, certain motions. He slides his hand down the arch of Rufus' forearm when he's done, and then he puts a pair of chopsticks into the man's hands. Rufus spares him an exasperated cock of the eyebrow.

Balthier snorts. 'The two of you.'

Tseng steps away from Rufus and goes around the table towards Balthier. 'I'm sure that you'll settle down enough someday to learn to bear with this.'

'Rings and domesticity? Oh, please—'

Tseng's mouth on Balthier's is always surprisingly warm, and always unbearably insistent. Tseng never kisses like he means it, but he always kisses so damned well that it's hard to tell. His fingers dig into Balthier's scalp for one moment, pulling, dragging; when Tseng stops and moves away it’s Balthier that reaches.

'I wouldn't call it domesticity,' Tseng says, and then he's gone, heading for the door and slipping out of it before Rufus or Balthier can really respond.

There's silence, for a moment. Balthier licks the corners of his mouth.

'Does he usually do that?' Balthier asks Rufus.

Rufus snaps open his chopsticks. 'I don't know,' he answers, truthfully. He picks up a steaming box and considers the contents before passing it over. 'Up until a few months ago I never knew he had a years-old affair on the side. You tell me what's typical.'

'Typical of Tseng, then, ' Balthier says. 'Why do I have a fork and you have chopsticks?'

'Each to his own nature. Tseng takes note of things like these.'

Balthier stabs his stirfry. It releases another billow of steam. 'I'm perfectly capable of eating with chopsticks. '

'I'm sure you are.'

'I am.'

'Your skills may come in useful, then.' Rufus collects another box. 'Tseng tends to buy Chinese.'

-

Later, they break one of the newly-constructed chairs in a fit of sweat and frustration fuelled exuberance. Rufus vacuums sawdust and plastic splinters off his floor while Balthier dresses again with motions holding the same kind of forceful excess that broke the chair. The process is considerably slowed down by his vociferous complaints regarding the quality of Swedish mass production.

'You're fully welcome to import your generations-old furniture from England, if you're deciding to stay,' Rufus says mildly, feeling slightly malicious over and on top of physically sore.

Balthier, looser after sex but also blunter, scowls. 'Shinra: you’re a dog with a bone, man, gnawing and refusing to let go. I suggest you stop asking dangerous questions.'

'That wasn't a question,' Rufus murmurs, allowing himself full play of the kind of rhetoric that fails to work on Tseng. He kicks away the barrel of the vacuum and sits. He feels alarmingly at home on the (surviving) white couch. Sprawled and smug and content and cruel; Rufus settles in. Balthier looks at him with a strangely intent expression, unreadable for once. 'I've always assumed Tseng already won you over. You aren't giving up already, are you?'

Balthier throws his (dubiously oiled) work rag into Rufus' face.

Rufus removes it with dignity. 'It's natural, you know. The more you try and hold Tseng down the more you'll find that you're the one getting tied up.'

'Is that why the two of you seem practically engaged?' Balthier asks. 'A ring to seal your emasculation?'

'I don't think either of us play that game.' Rufus speaks with the magnanimity of someone who's won similar arguments many times before. 'If you're talking about this,' he raises his ringed hand, 'it's history more than romance.'

'In my experience all romance becomes history.' Balthier looks curious despite himself. 'Tell me, then. Was it a rich man-poor man brown paperback pornography special, or one of the classier black label romances?'

'I had an axe to grind with my father. If your way of dealing with family politics was to run, mine was to dash headlong into whatever pissed the man off more.'

'So you swung the other way,' Balthier ticks the items off his fingers, 'went for the poor man's alternative, openly dissented, then tried to take over Shinra’s finances?'

There's honest, liquid pleasure in Rufus' voice. 'Something like that. The rings weren't my idea at the end of the day. Tseng's not usually a gift-giving man. It was notable.'

'Gifts,' Balthier echoes. He hesitates observably, then shifts to settle himself at the other end of the couch. He stares at the blank television screen, his eyes tracing the shape of something not there. 'I could tell you such stories, of cologne and false generosity and the application of gifts as tactical weapons. The stories aren’t ones of history or romance, especially not from Tseng’s point of view. One gift from him is one too many.'

Balthier’s fingers are never still. Rufus watches the man play with his rings. Their silence holds: brothers in commiseration.

When the moment begins to drag on too long, Rufus comments: 'Think about it, though.'

Balthier throws himself back at that, shoulders sliding over the arm of the chair, legs still too long for the couch. He bares his throat to the ceiling as his head falls back; he pushes Rufus with his heels when he stretches his full length. 'I think about lots of things, Rufus. You'll have to be more specific than that.'

'The amount of money you'd save on trans-Atlantic commutes.' There’s something about smiling as he speaks; Rufus can feel the set of his mouth ache with it, a good ache. His voice is laced with a keen dagger of helpfulness. 'I own some land in Manhattan.'

'Some,' Balthier snarls, scathing. The next kick that comes Rufus' way is distinctly less gentle. Rufus still smiles.

Rufus smiles all through his shower, too, even when long arms wrap around him from behind, and press him roughly up against the cool tile.


End file.
